New Delhi: The world may worry about the impacts of artificial intelligence, but Salman Rushdie does not. For the acclaimed writer, AI is not a threat simply because it “has no capacity for originality.”
In an interview with Variety, the author of Midnight’s Children (1981) said that AI has no role in literature, cinema or storytelling.
“What it can do is suck up enormous amounts of information and produce versions of that. But what it can’t do is something nobody’s done before. And that’s what art is: to find things people haven’t done before. So, I mean I have less than zero interest in AI,” Rushdie added.
Rushdie went on to say that art was more than just entertainment.
“It’s challenging. And you challenge people; sometimes people don’t like it, but that is all the more reason for doing it,” he told Variety.
On 8 July, Rushdie was awarded the 14th Cultural Honour by the international cultural diplomacy organisation Liberatum in London.
While accepting the honour, in a ceremony on the theme “Freedom of Expression,” Rushdie also said that freedom of speech is under a “real assault” worldwide.
The novelist also spoke about upcoming adaptations of his previous works.
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The big picture
Rushdie cited the 2012 adaptation of his novel, Midnight’s Children, as “a rare exception he was satisfied with.” He went on to say that few book-to-screen adaptations have done justice to their literary versions, giving Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy and Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence (1993) as movies “equal to their literary sources.”
He also spoke about a possible series based on his 1981 novel. A Netflix deal with Indian filmmaker Vishal Bhardwaj was previously in the works but did not work out. Shedding light on the failed project, Rushdie said, “For money reasons and script reasons, I think Netflix didn’t like the direction that the scripts took. It happens. A very talented filmmaker, just didn’t work out.”
Rushdie is also currently writing a new novel, but refused to share details about it. Alex Gibney’s documentary on Rushdie’s 2024 memoir Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder, titled Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January. He added that the film will be released in the United Kingdom in September, with likely releases in the United States and Europe as well.